Sepang 2026 · Stories
The Last King of Sepang
By Will Tygart · September 28, 2026
On October 1, 2017, a kid won the Malaysian Grand Prix and the track went dark behind him.
Max Verstappen had turned twenty the day before. Birthday weekend. He started on the front row next to Lewis Hamilton, who had just taken a record-equaling pole position, and by lap four the kid was past him — a clean move into turn one — and then he simply drove away from the field.
It wasn't dramatic. That was the remarkable part. No safety car, no rain chaos, no last-lap lunge. Just a twenty-year-old in a Red Bull imposing himself on a Grand Prix and never giving it back.
The context made it stranger. Sebastian Vettel, Hamilton's title rival, had been condemned to the back of the grid after an engine failure in qualifying — and then drove one of the great recovery drives, carving from last all the way to fourth. Kimi Räikkönen's Ferrari never even made the start with power unit trouble. Everything that weekend said this would be a Mercedes cruise. Instead, the youngest winner of the day rewrote the script.
People called it a changing of the guard. They weren't wrong, they were just early. The guard changed, all right — it just took a few more years, a few more championships, and a dominance run that buried that Sepang afternoon deep in the résumé.
Nine years later, he's coming back.
Verstappen returns to Sepang now as a four-time world champion. He is the last driver to ever win a Grand Prix at this circuit — nobody else on the grid can say that. The track sat silent through his entire prime. His championships, his records, his era-defining seasons: none of them happened here. The one win he does have at Sepang belongs to a teenager the sport barely knew yet.
And here's the part I keep turning over: he is not arriving as the favorite. The Red Bull has been off the pace of the Mercedes and the Ferrari for much of this season. But there are signs of life — second place in Baku, less than two-tenths behind George Russell, and a run of recent weekends where the old sharpness has been flickering back on. The bookmakers still won't write him off at Sepang. Neither should you.
There's something about athletes returning to the scene of their first great statement. Most of the time the place has changed, or they have, or both. Sepang hasn't hosted a Grand Prix in nine years — the circuit is the same sweeping, heat-soaked ribbon it always was, and the kid who closed it is the one walking back through the gate.
He was twenty years and one day old when he won the last one. He'll be twenty-nine when the lights go out on Sunday. Same track. Same driver. Everything else different.
The last king of Sepang is coming home to defend a crown nobody's challenged in nine years.